Foxit PDF Viewing

Opening, rendering and viewing PDF documents is the most important element of our PDF SDK. Due to the years of expertise we have in the industry, our technology is fast, accurate and robust. Using our PDF librairies you can render PDF documents consistently across all platforms and long term preservation, regardless of the device you use to view them. Our ability to render even the most problematic of documents shows our expertise and the investment we put into the research and development of our product so that we can provide the best offering to our customers.

Feature Pages

What is PDF Viewing?

PDF documents are files that consist of everything needed to visualize the document. Things like fonts and graphics are stored separately inside the file alongside a technical description of how the page should look. All of these elements are combined together by the PDF software and, almost magically, transformed into a visual representation of each page.

This technical page description is vitally important as it allows any document to look exactly the same way on any device with a visual fidelity matching exactly the way the document author/designer meant it to look. This process of visualizing the PDF is known as rendering.

However, a PDF is not simply an electronic version of paper and the job of the PDF viewer isn’t only to display the page. There is a rich interactive layer that exists over the the pages, including hyperlinks, form fields, bookmarks, thumbnails and optional content groups. This UI layer allows the end user to interact with the document and it is in providing this interactivity where Foxit’s PDF viewing technologies shine.

Many document workflows are dynamic in nature. End users often need to fill forms, add annotations and make other changes to their documents. This editing process is fundamental to the PDF viewing experience.

ELEMENTS OF PDF Viewing

Built-in UI Extension for Fast Utilization

BOOKMARKS, THUMBNAILS, ETC

Embedded Fonts, Colors and Images

PDF Document Page Layers

Reflow and Mobile Viewing

High Quality and Accurate Rendering

Interactive Document Viewing in the palm of your hand

PDF documents are well suited to viewing on a multitude of devices, from desktop computers to mobile devices such as phones and tablets. Smaller screens provide certain challenges when a large amount of data needs to be presented in a limited amount of space. Foxit’s reflow technologies allow certain documents to be interpreted in a semantic way with the visual presentation adjusted to ensure optimum usage of the limited space available.

The user interface on mobile is quite different to that on desktop devices. In particular, users make use of multi-touch and gestures to navigate around a mobile document compared to using a keyboard and mouse. Foxit has dedicated a significant amount of effort to optimizing this mobile experience.

While mobile device capabilities have improved over the years there are still major limitations. One issue in particular is that many mobile devices have small amounts of memory. Many software vendors are forced to aim to the higher end of devices. In contrast, Foxit is a pioneer the field of Out Of Memory (OOM) handling.

During PDF rendering, the Foxit software continually monitors the memory used by the device and various strategies are employed to keep the memory usage as low as possible. Our customers can be confident that their PDF viewing solution will work across a wide variety of devices spanning the full range of low-end to high-end devices.

Why PDF Viewing?

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Accurate Rendering of PDF Documents Every Time

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Flexibility to Ensure that We Can Handle PDF Edge Cases

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Long Term Preservation With PDF/A

PDF/A and Archiving

When archiving documents the fundamental issue is ensuring that the visual representation of the document stays constant over a long period of time. Technical specifications, such a PDF/A, introduce certain limitations to what is allowed in a PDF in addition to strict guidelines of the structure of the files themselves. The focus is on making the files completely self-contained without any reliance on any external data. This ensures that the same document will be rendered identically far into the future, preserving the content.

Edge Cases

Even the most modest of estimates place the number of PDF documents around the world into the trillions – and counting. There are countless vendors, each producing PDFs in slightly different ways. Unless a document has been validated according to a strict PDF specification there are countless ways for there to be subtle mistakes and ambiguities in the document. This is one more area where the superior rendering features in Foxit software comes to the fore. The software is designed from the ground up to completely fault tolerant. During PDF rendering and processing, any errors that are encountered are handled gracefully without crashing.

USE CASES

Viewing Autocad in Engineering

Engineers need high quality blueprints that are oftentimes large digital files. Converting these documents to PDF not only lowers the chance of having large files but also guarantees high quality images for site engineers and other staff to mark-up. Our PDF technology can render minute details that allows users to zoom in and make notes on the smallest bolt on the image. Using mobile or handheld devices on sites can be beneficial for engineering and construction workers while still upholding the quality standards that are very important to the industry.

Advanced Workflows For Document Management

Document Management can be complex but, with Foxit’s technology, creating a workflow with high fidelity, accurate documents that are rendered the way the author intended is 100% possible. Give customers a great user experience through adding bookmarks, thumbnails and other document level features that can help them to find things within documents easier.

Digital Archiving Goals With Insurance

Archive through PDF/A to ensure long-term preservation so that documents remain consistent over time and devices. Use embedded fonts to allow anyone to open and view documents easily without needing to take any extra steps. Our technology can ensure even the oldest and ill created documents can be opened and rendered, making doing business easy for customers.